CHAPTER TWELVE
?
SEREN
The Council’s pavilion was pitched inside our own roof. Gray cloth on gray poles, and its guy-ropes pegged down into the joints of the Court’s own floor, and nobody had said one word about it. Ilyan Frost stood at the edge of it and had not spoken since we came in off the road.
A man crossed forty feet of cleared herringbone to reach me, unhurried, through the middle of the floor instead of along its wall, and stopped an arm’s length short. “Seren Vale. You’ve had a cold ride and nobody’s given you anything hot. That’s the Winter Court all over.”
Nobody had told him which one I was.
“Half a day,” I said. “The relay road. It’s thawing.”
“It is, and my boots are finished, and I’m told the wind’s southwest, which I’m assured is good news for somebody.” He turned a hand toward the fire-trough as though he were offering it to me. “Aurelian Sarn. It should come off my mouth and not off a seal.”
My pulse came up under the collar before I had decided anything at all about him. He had a low voice, and he let the ends of his own sentences finish.
Ilyan Frost stood in the buttery draft with the door open behind him.
Corvin Ash arrived at Vaughn’s shoulder. “Thirty-three days, and he came himself.”
Vaughn Ironmere set his palm flat on the stacked trestles by the pier and left it there, and said nothing, which from Vaughn is an answer.
Sarn worked the hall the way I would work a hillside. One quarter at a time. Nothing hurried and nothing skipped.
He touched the back of a chair before he sat in it.
“Warden, how are the kennels wintering?” he said. “I’m told you feed better than we do.”
“They’re fed,” Vaughn said.
“Which is more than the Nine manage, and we have a budget for it.” Sarn smiled at his own boots. “I’m a bad guest, Warden. I stay until somebody tells me to go, and nobody ever has.”
Lord Vantry said something about the Law further down the floor, and did not trouble to lower his voice while he said it.
“It isn’t a cruelty, my lord, and I’ve stopped arguing that with people who’ve made their minds up.” Sarn did not turn around.
“The Severance Law says a half-blood can’t carry a fae bond. It doesn’t say she can’t have a house, or a trade, or a mate out of her own kind. It says one thing and every hall I walk into hears nine.”
“And the ones already carrying one?” I said.
He looked at me then, and he looked pleased, the way a man looks when a dog does something clever.
“That’s a better question than his lordship’s, and I’m not going to answer it standing up.”
Two hundred voices came up off the flagstone, so every word in that hall arrived twice. It smelled of trodden rush and wet gray cloth and roast fat, and under it, thaw.
Corvin said something at the far end that I could not hear, and a whole block of the Court laughed.
“Your Blade is the only genuinely funny man in Vaeloth’s file on this Court, and I’ve read it twice,” Sarn said, to me, delighted about it.
“He’d want that written down.”
“He’ll have it written down by supper. Have you eaten? Nobody in this building has fed you and I’ve been counting.”
That is the part I want on record. He asked. He waited for the answer.
An hour went by like that, the way a good day’s tracking goes by.
“Warden, I’ve been in this hall an hour and I’ve been offered a chair four times and threatened once, and I’d call that hospitable,” Sarn said.
“Threatened by who?” Corvin said.
“By a woman with a tray. She’d have done it, too.”
Vaughn moved once, completely. His hand came off the trestles and went still on the top of the chair-back instead.
“How long has the second Writ been on my ground?”
The hall did not go quiet. It got about a quarter quieter, which is worse.
“Warden, I don’t lie. I withhold. Those aren’t the same thing and you know they aren’t.” Sarn said it gently, as though he were apologizing for a draft in a room he did not own.
“You can ask me anything you like and I’ll tell you the truth or I’ll tell you that I’m not telling you. I’ve never done it any other way.”
Nobody in that hall could lay a hand on him, and he had come four hundred miles in person to stand on our floor and be pleasant.
?
The seeker-glass came off the lectern in the standing hall at a quarter past four. Corvin had come up behind me off the floor and Ilyan was over at the wall.
The glass was the size of a hand mirror, in a gray metal frame, and Sarn’s clerk carried it down the standing hall. It looked like something a man would shave in.
It lit on a fletcher’s boy near the trough, low, and went out. It lit on one of the Hunt. It lit on a girl carrying bread, and the clerk wrote nothing down.
Then it came along the line where I was standing, and I took the whole room’s air in one pull before I knew I had done it.
The glass passed over me.
Nothing.
The clerk stopped. He brought it back a few inches, held it a breath longer, and moved it across me a second time.
“Nothing. Passing again.”
Behind my right shoulder, Corvin Ash let out a breath.
That was not a sigh and it was not a word. It was a held breath going out of a man in one go.
I hear a deer do that at eighty yards through weather. I heard this one from four feet, and I filed it where I file everything, and I had no idea what I was holding.
The clerk went on down the line. Ilyan Frost was watching the glass and not watching me, which is its own kind of watching.
Sarn’s clerk came back up the hall with a folded paper and a voice like warm milk.
“The Ravensgate collar-tally, for inspection. It’s routine.”
“For inspection, routine, absolutely—and you’ll want the kennel roll with it, and the season book, and I’ll have all three on a table before you’ve had your supper,” Corvin said, and took the paper out of the man’s fingers, and was already talking about the state of Rhodry’s handwriting.
He took my papers off a Council clerk in front of the Court and did not show them to me.
The paper went into the front of Corvin’s coat. I would see it go into a drawer in the Blade’s rooms that evening. At the time I thought he was only being efficient.
“Seren Vale,” Sarn said, “who keeps the book your collar’s written in?”
I got my mouth open.
Corvin was between us. He had not appeared to move, and there had been six feet of floor there, and now there was a black-eyed man standing in it.
“Rhodry keeps it, it’s been kept badly, and I’ve been fixing it since Saturday, which you’d know if your clerk had asked me instead of her.”
“She’s my tracker, Chancellor. She’s mine. You can ask me.” Vaughn had not raised his voice. He was twelve feet off and had not looked at Corvin once.
They would not let me answer a question with my own name in it, and the hall liked them for it.
Sarn laughed. It was a real laugh, short, and it had genuine pleasure in it.
“There. That’s the whole Court in one sentence.”
They reset the glass on its stand, and the hall broke apart into knots of talking, and the pavilion’s inner cloth hung between the wall piers and the noise.
Corvin got two fingers in the front of my shirt and walked me backward two steps into the pier’s shadow, and the cloth swung shut behind him, and he was talking before my shoulders touched stone. He did not ask. He moved me the way he moves a chair.
“He said your whole name and you went still, and I’ve watched you take a Writ better than that.”
He pushed me back into the pier and came at me from below the jaw. His mouth went along my throat under the collar’s edge and he talked into the skin as he went.
“You’re going to tell me it’s the cold in here. You told me that on Sunday and I let you have it—”
His hand went under my shirt at the small of my back, flat and cold, and then around, and my breath left me in one piece.
“There. That’s you. That’s not the cold and it’s not the pier and we both know it—”
He had my breasts in both hands and my nipples between his fingers and he said what my body was doing back to me while it did it. My hips went forward off the stone before I had decided one thing.
“And there’s that. Beautiful. You did that, I didn’t. Your nipples are up through two layers of wool and it’s warm as a bread oven in here, so don’t sell me the cold—”
“There are two hundred people through that cloth.”
“Two hundred and eleven. I count too.”
His mouth came onto mine. His hand stayed where it was, a nipple caught and rolling under the pad of his thumb, and he talked into the kiss as well, and it should not have worked, and I gave in, and my hands were shut in his coat.
He got a thigh between mine. His cock was hard against my belly through the wool of both of us, and he pushed it there deliberately, and put his mouth back at my ear.
“That’s my cock and you’ve noticed, and I’m not embarrassed about it and I’m not going to pretend, because you’ve had your hand shut in my coat since I put you on this pier and you haven’t moved it—”
His thumb went across a nipple, once, slow, and my whole spine went with it. It made me feel alive in a way I would not put a name to.
Boots came around the cloth.
He was three feet away and mid-sentence about the season book before the clerk was through, hands loose, bored. My back was on the pier and my heart was going in my ears and there was a hall full of the Winter Court on the other side of six feet of cloth.
I put my shirt straight. I counted the doors of the standing hall, chin moving with the count. Five and the buttery arch. Every one Ilyan had come through today was standing open behind him.
For an hour I had liked Aurelian Sarn. I had liked him the way you like weather that is going your way.
And standing there with my shirt crooked I understood how simple it would be to let a man that pleasant sit me down and explain my own life to me, in order, in that voice, and how much of me would have been glad to hear it.
I knew what he was and I liked him anyway.
?
The rider came in from Ravensgate at half past four with the thaw on him to the knee, and Ilyan brought him across the hall floor to me.
“From Rhodry, Master of the Ravensgate kennels. The girl Nettle is on the quota roll as of Monday’s measure.”
Nettle is twelve. She was measured on Monday evening and her blank was on the tally-shed desk when I left it, and I had left it there because I could think of nothing to say that would not be a lie.
“She goes back north tonight,” Vaughn said.
“She does not,” Corvin said. “She goes north when the Chancellor’s clerk has gone south, and not one hour before, and I’ll tell you why in three parts—”
“Rhodry can hold a child off a roll for a fortnight,” Ilyan said, from the buttery draft. “He’s done it before.”
“Rhodry can hold a child off a roll the way a sieve holds soup.”
“All three of you. Stop.”
They stopped. I liked that three men that old stopped when I said so. I liked it more than I will admit to.
“I’ll go north when the road’s fit,” I said. “It’s mud to the axle on the north relay tonight and there’s no moon. I’d be walking a horse for eleven hours to arrive tired.”
“See,” Corvin said. “Reasonable. Sensible. Nobody in this Court is reasonable and sensible, it’s why I have to be charming—”
“Is that what that is.”
“It is, and I’d like it noted that a woman who called me a bird of the wrong sort in this hall on Sunday, in front of Hesk, in front of the Court, has no standing to—” He stopped. He put the flat of his hand on his own sternum. “I’m a raven—”
“Nobody said otherwise.”
“Somebody did.”
“Not me,” I said, and Ilyan Frost, who does not laugh in public, turned his face into the draft.
Corvin found me at the door with the thaw coming under it in a gray line.
“He hasn’t told you one lie since he walked in. That’s what’s wrong with him.”
“I didn’t want to hear that.”
“I know you didn’t. Everything that man says can be checked and none of it is the thing you need, and you’ll spend a month running true spoor away from the animal. I’ve never lied to you. I’m not starting on the day he arrives.”
The Court filed out into the thaw, and the snow was going gray on the roofs and dropping off them in slabs.
Sarn stopped at the pavilion’s mouth with the seeker-glass in his own hands. He was turning it over, looking into the gray metal frame and the dead face of it, and not at me.
He was walking again before he had finished, with his clerk and four gray coats closing up around him, and my mouth was open on an answer, because I answer what I am asked. Corvin took me by the wrist and his fingers stayed shut on it.
“Nothing on you at all, Seren Vale,” he said. “Would you like to know what that means, or should I leave it?”
“Say it.” I did not take my wrist out of Corvin’s hand.
“A glass can be blind,” Sarn said. “An old entry cannot. Someone in this Court has been trusting the wrong one.”
He left me with that, and I went to find the one man who could make metal answer him.